Recycling Art

Make a miniature garden cart using the scoop from laundry soap. Make a pattern for 2-inch wheels and let the kids trace and cut it out. Add lines for wheel spokes. Glue the wheels to both sides of the cup (open end facing up). The handle is the wheel barrel handle! Next, put dirt in the wheel barrel. Plant any flower you like (geraniums do well). Recycling is fun!

Cover thick phone book with back of brown paper bag. Let child decorate their own booster seat with crayons or stickers.

Make recycled sand art pictures. Gather some sand from the sandbox. Add food coloring to make colored sand. Have the students color a picture. Then put glue on the paper and pour the sand on it. Shake the extra off.

Decorate old paper tubes with crayon, markers, paint, or stickers. Cut small pieces of wax paper. Put one piece of wax paper on one end and secure it with a rubber band. Talk into the open end. Now you have a talking kazoo.

Stuff a white paper lunch sack with newspaper, insert a paper towel tube into the open end of the sack and put a rubber band around it to hold it together. This makes the puppets head and handle. Decorate by adding cut strips of newspaper hair, aluminum foil balls for eyes, red foam smiles cut from meat trays, and anything else you think would add to the project. We call our puppets Recycling Rita or Rick.

For older children 5-6 you can discuss recyclable materials and have them cut out pictures from magazines and use real materials such as newspaper and plastic to make a collage.

The Rain Stick (Another neat way to recycle paper towel tubes…) I used paper towel rolls to make Rain Sticks for a 2nd grade class.

We first read a book about The Rain Stick, then we made our own like this:

You will need:

Paper towel rolls Brown packing tape (or any kind of tape you can paint on) Brown tempera paint Toothpicks White glue Rice I pre-poked holes in them (a lot of holes) before the kids started to work on it and I also covered one end of the roll with tape. Use tape you can paint on.

The kids then painted their stick with brown tempera paint. Let the stick dry then have the kids put toothpicks through one hole and out another. Glue both ends of the toothpick. The whole idea is to have the toothpicks going in at different angles to make the required sound. Have an adult cut off any protruding ends of the toothpicks.

Each child then fills their roll with rice. I had them decide on their own how much to use; just have them put the rice in a little at a time and have them flip it back and forth so they could hear the “rain” sound they wanted. (It won’t take a lot of rice though.)

Tape up the other end with paintable tape and, there you have it, a rainstick!!!!!

There are packing pieces made out of starch that when slightly wet, stick together. you need: packing pieces, shirt cardboard, sponges wet with colored water. The children are instructed to touch the packing pieces onto the wet sponges then stick them onto the cardboard and to each other to build interesting and creative structures. (they do not need to be very wet to stick to each other)

We will remain to be a continually blooming and growing resource for educators and parents of preschool children. Your opinion is important to us! What do you like about The Perpetual Preschool? How can we improve?